Hearthstone's New Expansion Is Live, Though Progression Is Still A Sore Spot

Hearthstone's newest expansion, Madness at the Darkmoon Faire, is now live, and it offers 135 new cards flavored with carnival fun and a sprinkle of Old Gods spice to make the games a bit more ... interesting. The expansion brings a new keyword, Corrupt, which morphs a card in your hand into a more powerful version if you play a more expensive card first. It also kicks off the final phase of the Year of the Phoenix, before a new year and set rotation happens next spring.

If you haven't tried it already, you can also take a shot at the new game mode, Duels, which lets you construct a mini-deck from your own collection that upgrades after each round of Arena-like battles. Blizzard released a dev diary that talked about the new mode today, particularly how the dev team decides on the various pools of cards you can pick from.

Then there's the new progression system, which went live last week and is not exactly getting rave reviews. Whenever you're completely overhauling how players receive rewards -- and, in the case of the Tavern Pass, potentially charging money for it -- you need to get it just right, and that looks to not have been the case here. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen that in an online game.

Blizzard has been silent about any potential changes coming to the progression system, so players will just need to bear it for a while. That assumes that angry players stick around at all, which has been the threat from many, but we know how that often turns out.